the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet speculation
and then had accused me to my face of having "cried."
I had supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I
could literally--for the time, at all events--rejoice, under this
fathomless charity, that they had not entirely disappeared.
To gaze into the depths of blue of the child's eyes and pronounce
their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty
of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred
to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation.
I couldn't abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat
to Mrs. Grose--as I did there, over and over, in the small hours--
that with their voices in the air, their pressure on one's heart,
and their fragrant faces against one's cheek, everything fell
to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty.
It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all,
I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that,
in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my show
of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate
the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come
to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I
then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit.
It was a pity that I should have had to quaver out again
the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much
as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even
as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted,
by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she
didn't, and at the same time, without showing anything,
arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did! It was a pity
that I needed once more to describe the portentous little activity
by which she sought to divert my attention--the perceptible